News and resources on French thinker Michel Foucault (1926-1984)

Foucault’s Naissance de la cliniquewas published in two editions in his lifetime. The first appeared in 1963 as the first volume in Georges Canguilhem’s ‘Galien’ series with Presses Universitaires de France. The second appeared in the same series in 1972. There are a number of changes between the first and second editions, notably the removal of a lot of the overtly structuralist language, but also some quite large additions.

There have been several reprints of that second edition in the Quadrige series. But unhelpfully, sometime between the 3rd Quadrige edition (1993) and the 9th (2015) the text was reset, and the pagination changed – the preface was incorporated into the main page running order. I’ve made dual references below.

Alan Sheridan’s English translation as The Birth of the Clinic appeared in 1973, shortly after the second edition. But because the structuralist language of the first edition appears…